The World Has a Story
by Khaures
Summary: A collection of brief oneshots about a collection of various places.
1. The Desert Has a Heartbeat

**Suggestions of "The _ Has a _" made in reviews will be duly noted.**

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><p>The desert is a wasteland.<p>

It is full of shifting sand and rock, of stiff and dead-looking grass. The wind screams and lashes at its remaining features. Soon enough, it will grind them into dust. It will grind everything into dust, given time.

Every surface is hot, so unbearably hot. The sun never sets, because there is no sun here; unmoving stars look upon the sand with a scorching glare. They heat it like a furnace, reluctant to give up the brightness of their imitation of daylight. Once rich in hue, the sand becomes fine white marble beneath their stares. Soft ribbons run through it and dark rocks overlap it.

The desert is dry. Not for miles and miles can a drop of water be found. The desert does not know the sky. Clouds roll in and promptly evaporate into boiling steam high above its surface. That steam vanishes into vapor, baked away by the heat. Once upon a time, perhaps in a distant fairy tale or a memory, Agon knew the meaning of rain. Now the word is foreign, its meaning lost to time. What is the storm?

This place is dry and hot and dead. Its breath is but a ghost of rasping breezes. On the surface, it is perfectly still. It's an unrepentant, motionless wall. But if you look close, you will notice something very interesting: this is the perfect disguise. No one can tell what lurks deep beneath it, where the sand still shifts and where the rock still grinds. Place your hands on the ground and become immobile as stone and you will feel it.

The desert has a heartbeat.


	2. The Mountain Has a Feeling

The mountain is a guardian.

It protects the delicate circuits that rest within it, a solid stone case around the fickle electricity. It's like the exoskeleton that protects the delicate insect inside, like the hard shell that preserves the precious seed inside. The mountain is home to the machines. The macines are company to the mountain. One protects the other, and through their isolation they find companionship. Theirs is nothing less and nothing more.

Theirs is a simple relationship, really. Without the mountain to act as a roof from the rain, the machines would die soon. Without the machines to fortify the rock, the mountain would crumble soon. Neither is truly alive, and yet both act to ensure the other's survival. It's a bit of a funny concept, stopping to think about it. The mountain is fine as it is. The machines are fine as they are. What else but cold steel could acheive such simple contentment? Animals always fight.

But nothing is ever that simple. If it used to be, it isn't anymore. Shadows lurk about the corners, pretending to be what they aren't. And the machines know these shadows shouldn't exist. They defy the light, artificial or not, and no amount of systematic warnings convinces them to leave. When the machines fight back, the mountain is no longer a place of peace.

The shadows come seeping into the circuits then, writing over the AI with their own brand of control. Now they are the ones who reside in the mountain, and the machines don't serve the mountain anymore. At least not in the way they used to. They have no knowledge of what has changed them, and the machines are not even aware that they have been changed. Only the mountain knows, and it has no voice, for it must keep all secrets.

The mountain has a feeling called loneliness.


	3. The Bog Has a Wound

The bog, once a forest, is full of rot.

The bog is _drowning._

Day does not bother to separate itself from night in this place. The sky is gray, as it always has been, as it always will be. It is invisible from the heavens because of the cloud. The cloud is a single body that never goes away, hovering as always, crying as always. Rain pounds into the bog hour after hour, never stopping and filling it deeper and deeper with skyfall. It won't stop even when the rain overflows and makes the area into a lake.

Starshine no longer embraces this place with its warm fingers, dancing through the tree leaves. Starshine doesn't even _exist_ here anymore, not when the weather has come to stay. Little survives here because of all the water. What does thrive must either adapt to the aquatic environment or else be struck down by lightning and killed. The thunderstorm makes no distinction between a safe place to strike and an unsafe place to strike. Lightning crashes down, always, always, and it would light the forest on fire if it were not so wet. If it had any fuel to give.

Buried under all the broken plants and the unnatural water lies a machine. It's dormant, a long-dead thing, and it's all crushed down without any hope of revival. They tried to save it and make it what it was again, but they could only torture it and twist it into something new. Now it's called a hydrodynamo station, and it uses the water for fuel, and it tries to pump the water out.

It doesn't work.

There is nothing and no one to care for the machine anymore, and it is slowly shutting down, its pumps and pistons jamming one by one. Soon, it won't do anything anymore, and it will become the broken shell it used to be. Where the water makes the earth sodden, deep beneath the surface, that's where the machine is. And it's cutting into the dirt like a blade, and the planet is bleeding, but there's no one around to pay attention to it. Soon, the planet will die, too.

The bog has a wound.


	4. The Temple Has a History

There the temple sits.

It's quiet, just as stone should be, and it lets the runes speak for themselves, the innumerable elaborate gates that litter its surface. Halfway unintelligible messages are scattered, broken into pieces, written bit by bit into the stone columns everywhere. These runes speak of a people long gone who had language long before they had a means to write it, and they only found that means once they discovered how to properly project three-dimensional holograms.

For them, according to the runes, thinking and seeing and reading in three dimensions is natural. These people did not confine themselves to a two-dimensional space as others did, for they could fly, and the sky was no limit of theirs.

And yet the temple is ancient and primitive like the ruins of long-ago empires, whose lasting messages have been carved into stone, because these words and tales have been carved into stone too, and _out_ of stone on occasion. It's a sad sight to see, like it was abandoned a long, long time ago and no one ever came back to restore it, instead letting the wind chip away at it piece by piece.

There is no sound here that any living thing makes, anymore. The war wasp hives have all dried out and become brittle, like the splinter cocoons, because there are only predators here, and a chain of creatures that do nothing but eat is something that was sure to kill itself off eventually. The wind is the only thing that make a sound here, lonely as it is, whistling between crevices and ghosting over the edges of the rocks. The wind is the only thing that moves here, usually, because everything else is too rooted in place to budge an inch.

Stone doesn't change. It just sits, waiting, unable to move on its own and unlikely to be moved by anything. The temple is made of stone. The stone is made of a hundred little intricacies all woven together, and in a strange kind of way, it's beautiful. It tells of something long gone past that can only be imagined now.

The temple has a history.


End file.
